Entering the workforce as a child care trainee will increase the incomes of most participating women above the average Clinton-Peabody $7,200 household income. But is clearly not a pathway out of poverty. The Economic Policy Institute reported in November 2015 that the median hourly wage for child care workers is $10.31, less than two-thirds of the median income for other occupations.

Others argue that decades of wage stagnation warrant ambitious increases. “The fact that these proposals are outside the bounds of recent experience does not automatically make them ill-conceived,” Economic Policy Institute’s Larry Mishel and David Cooperwrote. “Moving beyond the timidity of most recent minimum wage hikes is exactly what is needed if we are to undo decades of falling wages and deteriorating living standards for the lowest-paid third of America’s workforce.”

But even defenders will admit that eventually, as the minimum wage keeps rising past its historical high-water mark, it’s possible that some jobs could be lost. You hear the phrase “uncharted waters” a lot, because anything could happen. That’s why some liberal economists, such as the Economic Policy Institute, have only gone so far as to endorse a national hike up to $12 an hour by 2020. Liberal-ish columnists have been especiallyskeptical.

The fight for a $15 per hour minimum wage has won its biggest victories yet. California lawmakers voted for a bill to raise the minimum by 2022, while New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said he reached a deal to hike the wage in New York City by the end of 2018. Judy Woodruff examines the consequences with Douglas Holtz-Eakin of American Action Forum and David Cooper of the Economic Policy Institute.

The government estimates 1.7 million people are “marginally attached” to the labor force: those who would like a job but haven’t looked in the past year because of school or family obligations or because they’ve simply given up hope of finding one. Some economists believe the number could be even higher. An analysis by the Economic Policy Institute estimates more than 2 million workers missing from the labor force.

Most of the improvement in participation is coming from prime-age workers, those who are re-entrants, said Sophia Koropeckyj, a labor economist at Moody’s Analytics. The inflow of younger workers, those who are new entrants or have been students, accounts for less than one-quarter of the increase in the labor force, she said. “People who gave up see the unemployment rate dropping,” said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, offering one reason for their return. She noted that other government data show job openings are up. “Maybe they’re seeing more ads in the newspaper,” she said. “Maybe it’s just word of mouth.”

Elise Gould, senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said that while March’s jobs numbers showed signs of improvement, “wage growth continues to be below target levels, a sign that there continues to be substantial slack in the labor market.” She suggested the Federal Reserve continue to refrain from further interest rate hikes.

What’s more, extra people looking for work raises the national labor force participation rate – which measures the share of Americans at least 16 years old who are either employed or actively looking for work. That rate ticked up for the second consecutive month to 63 percent—its highest level in two years. “The unemployment rate ticked up slightly, while the labor force participation rate continued to show signs of improvement—an indication that workers are feeling optimistic and are beginning to come off the bench and take some practice swings,” Elise Gould, a senior economist and director of health policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, wrote in a research note Friday.

Meanwhile, the Economic Policy Institute’s “missing worker” metric—which tracks potential workers who by all rights would be either employed or looking for work, but aren’t due to a lack of job opportunities—finally started falling in mid-2015, and dropped again from February to March.

Daniel Costa, Director of Immigration Law and Policy Research at the Economic Policy Institute, pointed out that India was also upset last time Congress imposed fees on the guest worker program in 2010, but nothing came of the country’s complaint. “I don’t think they have much of a case, and they probably know they don’t have much of a case, but it’s sort of more symbolic to try to threaten and keep American legislators from passing any reforms on the program,” Costa said.

Yet critics of the H-1B visa effort counter that the program has undermined and eroded opportunities for workers born or living in the United States to land well-paying technology jobs. “Technology companies have gotten used to cheap labor on demand, and by bringing in cheap labor, high-tech employers are able to suppress wages,” said Ron Hira, a research associate with the Economic Policy Institute. “Tech employers hold the work permits through this program, and that gives the company extraordinary leverage over the foreign worker and limits their mobility.”

During 2014, 36.8 percent of Silicon Valley’s population was foreign born, a number that rose to 37.4 percent in 2015, according to a report released this year by Joint Venture Silicon Valley. California has a foreign-born population of 27.1 percent, while the U.S. is at 13.1 percent. “If you are a tech company and you know that you can pay much less for a worker through an H-1B visa, why wouldn’t you?” said Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research with the Economic Policy Institute. “Companies can pay $30,000 a year less to a worker in an H-1B visa program. Multiply that over the six years of the visa, that’s real money.”

Paul Krugman is correct that much of the negative impact of foreign trade for Americans results from our inadequate domestic policies, including the undercutting of the bargaining power of workers. But for the last 25 years this argument has been used to rationalize a perverse politics in which Democratic presidents ally with big business and Republicans to make trade deals that expose American workers to brutal competition, and then complain that they are helpless to stop these same “allies” from dismantling social safety nets and destroying labor unions. Like it or not, only the threat of protectionism will change this cynical behavior. Those who profess to care about the future of American workers should be demanding an immediate freeze, and where possible a rollback, of any new trade agreements until we have first established domestic policies, like those in Europe and Canada, that allow workers to prosper from trade. —Jeff Faux, Distinguished Fellow, Economic Policy Institute, Washington

According to the Economic Policy Institute’s Family Budget Calculator, the basic-needs budget for a single person in Bakersfield, California, is $14.64. With a single child, it rises to $23.59. In Baltimore, it is $17 for a single person and $29.58 for a worker with a dependent child. The full-time wage necessary to pay fair market rent for a modest two-bedroom apartment in a non-metropolitan area is $14 in both Arizona and Montana, and $18 in California. This compares to the current value of a 2021 $15 wage of $13.34.

According to numbers from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, the average worker who will see a raise under the new budget is a woman over 25 years old who works full-time and typically provides half her household’s income.

A slightly higher unemployment rate is not exactly bad news. Some economists would like to see the unemployment rate to go up slightly, if it signalled that Americans who had previously given up looking for jobs were now becoming more optimistic and attempting to re-enter the labor market. “While the unemployment rate has been holding steady, a slight rise in coming months could actually be a positive move—if driven by rising labor force participation, which would mean that potential workers see hope for themselves in the labor market and have started to look for jobs,” explained Elise Gould, senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.

When California and New York last approved minimum-wage increases in 2013, 14 states followed suit a year later and most at least matched New York’s current rate of $9 an hour. California’s current minimum is $10 an hour. The federal rate still prevails in 21 states. “It’s going to add fuel to the fire for other states looking to raise the minimum wage and potentially encourage them to go higher than they were initially thinking,” said David Cooper, an economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.

If true, it would mean that the US women soccer players are just like many other women in the United States, earning less than their male counterparts. On average, working women earn about 83 cents for every dollar men make, according to calculations from the Economic Policy Institute.

Among young and old, men and women, high school and college grads, part-time work is more common in Massachusetts than in the bulk of the United States. Overall, roughly one of every three workers in the Bay State clocks less than 35 hours a week, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute. While this may seem like a dubious distinction, it’s actually a sign of rare flexibility in the state job market.

One expert, Robert Scott at the Economic Policy Institute, estimates that the U.S. lost roughly 800,000 jobs to Mexico between 1997 and 2013. He cites NAFTA—the North American Free Trade Agreement signed in 1993—as the key driver for job losses.

In 2013 an updated estimate of his model showed that trade with poor countries depressed unskilled workers’ wages by 10% in 2011, up from 2.7% in 1979, according to Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute, a think-tank. In that time, trade accounted for one-third of the rise in the college premium.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump offers a lot of policy ideas that progressive economists hate. He wants to close up the country’s borders and crack down on immigration, something that could seriouslyhurt the economy. His tax plan would cost trillions and offer most of the relief to the wealthiest, with very little for the middle class and poor. But when it comes to his positions on trade, the same economists say he’s identified the right problems, even if some of his solutions might get him into trouble. “Trump has stumbled on, and I think it’s the right word, stumbled on to a very important issue,” said Robert Scott, senior economist and director of trade and manufacturing at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.

A report by the Economic Policy Institute concludes that unilateral MES status for China would endanger 3.5m jobs in EU industry by limiting anti-dumping tariffs. Almost all the EU’s 350,000 steel jobs would be a risk. If this is correct, and if allowed to run its course, Europe would be finished as an industrial and military region. It would be civilisational suicide.

That’s why PolitiFact called into question a Bernie Sanders ad that refers to 850,000 jobs lost under NAFTA. Sanders cites that number from a report from the Economic Policy Institute, which gets about a quarter of its funding from unions.

I got to know Les Thurow because we were part of a fairly small cohort of non-Marxian, left-of-center thinkers on economics. Thurow joined Robert Reich, Ray Marshall, Jeff Faux, Barry Bluestone, and myself in 1986, to found the Economic Policy Institute. We acted because virtually the entire mainstream economics profession had become something of a commercial for the proposition that markets are almost invariably efficient. Marxian economists, of course, had an entirely different view. But among non-Marxists, Thurow was perhaps the most eminent and well credentialed of those who challenged market verdicts as neither necessarily efficient nor just. We founded EPI in part because there was a huge hole in the world of think tanks. Before EPI, there were outfits like the American Enterprise Institute on the right and the Brookings Institution in the center but no real left-liberal institution committed to high quality research.

The battle has political ramifications. If conservatives can chip away at the funding of public-employee unions, they can weaken them and, in turn, hurt labor’s ally, the Democrats. “It’s totally political,” says Ross Eisenbrey, vice president at the Economic Policy Institute, a foundation- and union-supported think tank in Washington. “The business community doesn’t like unions by and large, and whenever they get an opportunity to undermine collective bargaining, they take it.”

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EPI is an independent, nonprofit think tank that researches the impact of economic trends and policies on working people in the United States. EPI’s research helps policymakers, opinion leaders, advocates, journalists, and the public understand the bread-and-butter issues affecting ordinary Americans.